Cool Websites: Internet Archive and WayBack Machine

Occasionally, I'll point out some cool websites to expand the mind of the WRM.

Have you visited the Internet Archive and it's WayBack Machine?





The goal of the Internet Archive is "universal access to human knowledge." That's ostensibly Google's goal too, albeit from a commercial perspective. The Internet Archive is a non-profit focused on building a digital library of Internet websites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Sort of the Library of Alexandria of the 21st century.

The WayBack Machine let's you browse through 85 billion web pages archived since 1996. So you can see websites at previous points in time.

As a marketer, it could be useful in a variety of ways-looking for past content from your own websites that you can't find internally, looking for nostalgia to use in new campaigns, looking for past competitive insights, positioning, etc. And of course, it can just be fun looking around in the past like looking at dusty, old magazines saved in the attic.

For example, here's Apple's website from October 22, 1996. You can get totally excited seeing the new PowerBook Family announcement with a 117MHz processor and 16MB of RAM for only $3500.


Since you were wondering, the Internet Archive is a huge database-2 petabytes so far, growing at 20 terabytes per month. You can link to old pages on the WayBack Machine as shown above. And the name comes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.

note: a petabyte is a thousand terabytes which is a thousand gigabytes which is a thousand megabytes. A typical PC sold today comes with 500 gigabytes of storage so the WayBack machine would require 4000 PCs worth of storage. As an additional aside, it's been estimated that the entire works of mankind in recorded history amounts to 50 petabytes of data. Next in line is the exabyte, then the zettabyte, then the yottabyte.